The initiative for this special issue on prosody in the Nordic languages developed in connection with an international symposium on prosody which took place in Lund on 2–3 June 2014 (http://konferens.ht.lu.se/en/bruce-2014/). The symposium commemorated the life and work of Gösta Bruce (1947–2010), our friend, teacher, mentor, and colleague during many years. Gösta's contributions to the field of prosody have been of utmost significance to the development of prosody research, in particular his work on modelling the structure and function of Swedish word accents ‘in sentence perspective’.
We are very grateful to the editors of Nordic Journal of Linguistics for giving us the opportunity to act as guest editors for this thematic publication. The special issue contains six very interesting and insightful contributions, dealing with a variety of prosodic phenomena from Swedish, Danish, Icelandic and Finnish, and a Norwegian-influenced variety of Esperanto. In what follows, we give a brief introduction to each of the papers.
In their article ‘The prosodic hierarchy of Swedish’, Sara Myrberg and Tomas Riad present a new comprehensive model for analyzing Swedish prosodic structure, involving three levels: prosodic word, prosodic phrase, and intonation phrase. An important insight in this work is that recursion of the prosodic word provides a framework that can describe the prosodic domains delimited by stress and by word accents better than a theory rigorously adhering to the Strict Layer Hypothesis. The article also develops Bruce's analysis of focal and non-focal word accents into a system where ‘big’ and ‘small’ accents can be used rather independently of pragmatic focus to delimit prosodic domains together with boundary tones.
Swedish word accents, specifically stem tones in South Swedish and their association with inflectional morphology is the topic of Mikael Roll's contribution. In his article, ‘A neurolinguistic study of South Swedish word accents: Electrical brain potentials in nouns and verbs’, Roll presents results that indicate that South Swedish stem tones are processed by the brain in a manner similar to Central Swedish tones even though the phonetic realization of the word accents in the two dialects are ‘mirror images’ of each other. The results corroborate earlier studies on Central Swedish showing that speakers use tones on word stems to predict upcoming grammatical suffixes. Moreover, accent 1 is observed to have a stronger predictive status due to its association with a more well-defined set of grammatical suffixes as opposed to accent 2, which, in addition, is also a prosodic cue to compound word structure.
Sara Juul Clausen and Line Burholt Kristensen's article, ‘The cognitive status of stød’, is a psycholinguistic study of the processing of Danish ‘stød’. Stød is a creaky voice realization of some stressed vowels, and is related to Swedish and Norwegian word accents. Diachronically, and in its relation to morphological structure, stød is more related to accent 1 than to accent 2. However, like accent 2, stød is phonetically more marked than the non-stød realisation. Similarly to previous results of accent 2-related suffixes in Central Swedish, Clausen and Kristensen also find stød-related suffixes to be more affected by the absence of their preceding prosodic cue. In other words, it might tentatively be argued that stød is more similar to accent 2 than to accent 1 as regards its processing and connection to suffixes, although it is diachronically more related to accent 1. It is also interesting to note that suffixes that are associated with the phonetically marked option (stød/accent 2-associated) seem to be more affected by the absence of their prosodic cue regardless of whether they are singular definite (Danish) or plural indefinite (Swedish).
In her contribution, ‘The intonation of the Icelandic other-initiated repair expressions Ha “Huh”) and Hvað segirðu/Hvað sagðirðu “What do/did you say”’, Nicole Dehé reports on a map-task study testing the intonation of repair elements in Icelandic. She finds a previously attested falling intonation, which is rather unusual cross-linguistically for these types of expressions. However, Dehé prefers not to give an explanation in terms of a specific prosodic realization or a relation to the falling prosody of questions in Icelandic. Instead, she proposes an account in terms of a default falling intonation pattern, which includes but is not limited to questions. She argues that a prosodic marking would add unnecessary information to the otherwise pragmatically unambiguous repair elements.
The last two contributions deal with prosodic phenomena involving compound words and phrasal prosody. In her article, ‘What do compounds and noun phrases tell us about tonal targets in Finnish?’, Anja Arnhold seeks a better understanding of what tonal features are crucial for the perception of a word string as a noun phrase as opposed to a compound in Finnish. In her study involving a perception experiment, Arnhold compares three accounts of Finnish intonation and uses manipulated f0 contours on compound word/phrase minimal pairs to test her hypothesis that a phrasal account of Finnish intonation, as opposed to an accent account, is the optimal one. Arnhold thus assumes that Finnish is a language whose intonation has the phrase as a basic unit, which is associated with two tones, H and L, realised early and late in the phrase, respectively. Using test words recorded as compounds but with manipulated f0-contours, results suggest that the falling part of a rise-fall phrasal contour associated with the word string is necessary for the string to be interpreted as a phrase. The results provide support for the assumption that Finnish is typologically a phrase language with respect to its intonational patterning.
In his article, ‘Compound stress in a Norwegian variety of Esperanto’, Jardar Eggesbø Abrahamsen presents compound stress data from a case study of a bilingual speaker of Norwegian and Esperanto. Using an Optimality Theoretic approach, Abrahamsen argues that the patterning of compound stress on either the first element of the compound (as in Norwegian) or on the penultimate syllable of the compound (as in Esperanto words in general) correlates with the degree of lexicalisation, with more penultimate stress associated with compounds that are assumed to have a simplex prosodic word structure resulting from lexicalisation. First element primary stress is assumed to be the default stress pattern for spontaneously formed compound nouns. The observation that some compound adjectives, verbs and adverbs derived from ‘penultimate stress nouns’ still exhibit occasional signs of being two words (double stress), suggests that the internal word boundary is, nevertheless, present in the input structure of the compound nouns.
We are very grateful to all the authors for their insightful contributions and for their excellent collaboration in putting this special issue together despite the rather rigorous time limits. We would also like to express our sincere thanks to the many reviewers who generously gave of their time and expertise and helped us greatly in the processing of the manuscripts.
This special issue on Nordic prosody is dedicated to the memory of Gösta Bruce.
